Hollywood Docket: CBS and ESPN Accused of Bad Intentions

By Eriq Gardner

TV Land is as strange as the lawsuits it engenders. Here's a couple of new ones:

• An actress stand-in on CBS' hit "CSI" is suing the network, claiming it retaliated against her for complaining of sexual harassment on the set. In the complaint filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, Shanelle Renee Howard says that after three years of stand-in work on the show, producers cut her workload back more than 90 percent after she gave testimony to others pursuing a separate sexual harassment claim.

• A former boxer now serving prison time has filed a pro se lawsuit against ESPN Classic after the station rebroadcast his fight against Joe Frazier. The boxing match represented Frazier's last fight, but Floyd "Jumbo" Cummings says it violated his rights of publicity. He's seeking $50 million in damages and in what might be called either rambling or poetic, his self-penned complaint says:

"ESPN Classic, well knowing the said premises, but contriving and wrongfully and maliciously intending to injure and aggrieve me and to bring me into public notoriety and to destroy the comfort of my life and peace and tranquility of mind, and to thrust upon me, unsought, unwarranted and undesired publicity and notoriety, utterly obnoxious to me, and annihilate and destroy.."